"There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself."

– Virginia Woolf

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How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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20 books — 20 genres

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

– Carl Sagan's prediction in 1995.

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10 Most Mentioned Books on the Modern Wisdom podcast by Chris Willx

1. "Atomic Habits" by James Clear
2. "1984" by George Orwell
3. "The Precipice" by Toby Ord
4. "Deep Work" by Cal Newport
5. "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom
6. "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright
7. "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright
8. "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel
9. "Die with Zero" by Bill Perkins
10. "Man's Search" for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

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“Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”

– Salman Rushdie

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20 books to become a multidisciplinary thinker:

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"We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed."

– Justin Torres, We the Animals

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3 books to reclaim your attention span:

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“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

– Sylvia Plath

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6 books every aspiring founder should read:

1. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
3. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
4. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
5. Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet
6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

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